With Feud Over, New Women’s Ice Hockey League Is Set to Begin

With a long-running feud in girls’s skilled ice hockey now settled, a brand new league with most of the world’s finest gamers is able to push ahead in January, and its inaugural house cities and different particulars had been introduced on Tuesday.

The six groups within the new Professional Women’s Hockey League might be evenly divided between the United States and Canada, with groups in Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, the New York metropolitan space, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. The crew nicknames and arenas are to be decided.

“The journey to get us here has been long and twisted,” stated Jayna Hefford, a five-time Olympian for Canada who’s the brand new league’s senior vice chairman for hockey operations.

The prime girls’s hockey league from 2015 to 2023 was the Premier Hockey Federation, which was initially known as the National Women’s Hockey League. It struggled to succeed in the extent of success of different prime males’s and girls’s skilled leagues in North America. Small salaries meant that gamers usually needed to work second jobs, and tv protection was not outstanding.

Dissatisfied with the league’s progress, members of the gamers’ union, the Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association, boycotted the league starting with the 2019-20 season. The tons of of gamers who participated within the strike included virtually the entire prime names from the American and Canadian Olympic groups. That left the ladies’s league with second-tier gamers and few of the names followers might need acknowledged.

The gamers’ union regarded into forming its personal league, and groups it assembled performed barnstorming video games across the two international locations in competitors with the P.H.F.

The P.H.F. made strides, growing its wage cap to $750,000 per crew in its last season and luring just a few gamers again. But a overwhelming majority of them by no means rejoined it.

In June, the union and the P.H.F. agreed to a deal that may see them merge, with the intention of beginning a brand new league, owned by the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises. Players have ratified a collective bargaining settlement going ahead, and all P.H.F. contracts have been voided.

Each crew within the new league can signal three gamers as free brokers earlier than a 15-round draft on Sept. 18. Final rosters may have 23 energetic gamers. The league says that six gamers on every crew might be signed to three-year contracts of not less than $80,000 a yr, whereas most different gamers might be on one- or two-year offers.

For the primary season, every crew will play 24 regular-season video games beginning in January 2024. The league says that subsequent seasons will start in November and can embody 32 video games. Expansion can also be attainable going ahead, it stated.

In its last season, the P.H.F. had groups in Boston; Buffalo; Simsbury, Conn.; East Rutherford, N.J.; Richfield, Minn.; Montreal; and Toronto. With the beginning of the brand new league, Buffalo and Connecticut are shedding their groups, whereas Ottawa is gaining one.

N.H.L. Commissioner Gary Bettman has stated that his league was reluctant to become involved with girls’s hockey so long as the cut up continued. Stan Kasten, the president and chief government of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who’s on the brand new league’s board of administrators, stated the N.H.L. has supplied recommendation.

“The N.H.L. has been fantastically supportive of us,” he stated.

The N.H.L. will collaborate with the brand new league to prepare neutral-site video games in each N.H.L. and non-N.H.L. cities past the six house websites.

“No fan owes us their time or money,” Kasten stated. “It’s on us to earn it.”